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From Expatriate to Exile

Pound knew he had gone wrong. He regretted indulging in the ‘stupid suburban prejudice’ of anti-Semitism and felt he’d made ‘a botch’ of his magnum opus, the ‘Cantos’

By

Allan Massie

Feb. 5, 2016 4:30 p.m. ET

In 1965, Samuel Beckett invited the aged Ezra Pound to a performance of his play “Endgame,” in which two of the characters, Nagg and Nell, live in trash bins. Pound reportedly broke his by now habitual silence to say “C’est moi dans la poubelle” (“That’s me in the trash.”) His biographer, A. David Moody, writes: “Exactly what prompted him to place himself in Nagg’s dustbin remains a mystery.” Mr. Moody is a sympathetic and indeed exemplary biographer, but this is a strange remark. There is surely no mystery. Pound, reduced to silence by depression, knew that he had gone wrong. He had made “a botch” (his word) of...